Townes Van Zandt said to write a good song, you need to be alone and if the idea for a line or a phrase hits you, sit down right then and write it out. Townes is known as one of the all-time great songwriters and for a particular strain of music you will never hear on any popular radio, the talking blues. It is easy to lean serious and fall into the forlorn in the talking blues. However, people have still heard of Townes Van Zandt. Replace Townes with the name Blaze Foley and this description remains the same, except for the people have heard of him part. Blaze would be out all night at a strip club, gambling, and drinking, while his new wife sleeps to get ready to wait tables in the morning to support the both of them. He wrote the song “Should Have Been Home with You” while hungover and remorseful the next day. At a gig, he would never launch into a song like that without an intro, he would talk the bare bones audience into it.

Director and co-writer Ethan Hawke weaves together three story strands to show Blaze's life story - three different time periods. One strand follows the last day and night of his life, most of it spent in an Austin country bar called The Outhouse. If you don’t know the talking blues, real-life musician Benjamin Dickey, playing Blaze, is about to give you a crash course intro to the rambling genre, usually about the wrong he done to women, women who done him wrong, booze, drugs, and every other mistake you can list. Blaze’s formative years were not idyllic, but there were not too many external influences out of his control keeping him in trouble, alone, and on the wrong side of business and popularity. Nope, Blaze was his own worst enemy. But who better to write authentic blues songs than a sinner who can’t stop sinning?

Hawke’s co-writer is Sybil Rosen, Blaze’s ex-wife and the one who spent time with Blaze in a Georgia treehouse in their mid-20s relishing a paradise of solitude together, and Blaze’s initial inspiration to write songs. This was also where they conjured up the name Blaze, a nom de guerre for Michael David Fuller. This is the films’s second strand, Blaze and Sybil’s relationship. Based on Sybil’s memoir, Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley, we watch how they fall in love, travel America’s backroads from honkey tonk to honkey tonk, and ultimately part ways.

Alia Shawkat (Green Room) as Sybil personifies what a physical and cultural mismatch they were. Blaze was a hulking behemoth with a severe southern drawl and those down home turns of phrase most find endearing but others find ‘rural’ to put it a more polite way. Sybil was Jewish and slight. Introducing Blaze to her parents goes as well as you can imagine as dad questions him about faith and the possibility of conversion while mom, played by the real Sybil Rosen, sprints out of the living room to escape a situation she cannot comprehend. Hawke says he classifies Blaze as a “country-western opera”; if so, the Sybil parts of the show are the melodrama and the catalyst for most of the downtrodden songs to come. ​

Blaze’s third strand takes place a few years after his death with Townes Van Zandt (Charlie Sexton, Boyhood) and former band-mate and friend Zee (Josh Hamilton), conducting a radio interview. The DJ, played by Hawke, asks who is this Blaze Foley Townes mentions on his new record. Scenes flashback to raucous road houses, collaborations, and even guilt over who was there for Blaze when he may have needed them most. Like Dickey, Charlie Sexton is also a musician as are Blaze’s family, played by Kris Kristofferson and Alynda Lee Segarra. These characters require musicians, actors mimicking movements on an instrument would stick out like a sore thumb next to Dickey. I have never heard of Blaze Foley nor Ben Dickey, but I believe they are one in the same. Dickey’s performance is bold, larger than life, and shows one singer/songwriter channeling the boozy spirit of another singer/songwriter.

Hawke’s Director of Photography, Steve Cosens, cakes most of the daylight scenes in a dusty yellow and the nighttime in a neon red. Is the yellow a perpetual golden hour halo where the past is rosier than it was? Blaze’s long nights full of multiple liquid and smoky poisons may have turned his days to vomitus yellow. Cosens also shot Born to Be Blue, where Hawke played jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, another complicated, scarred musician with inner demons. Blaze feels like an Ethan Hawke passion project, the kind where a filmmaker hears about a legend, digs in to find out more, and discovers a movie underneath it. He’s right. Blaze’s story and Ben Dickey are made for the camera and Hawke’s country-western opera offers a realistic telling of Americana by a guy who appears to respect it, not a poseur intent on exploitation. Mainstream radio prefers their catchy tunes manufactured to appeal to that particular record-purchasing demographic. Blaze would have nothing to do with such a plastic process. Hawke’s film is akin to this feeling; it’s for an audience who appreciates story and style, not the factory formula.